Considering Selling Your Home?

Unless you are thinking about selling your home, I can’t imagine how you stumbled onto this page. The good news is selling your home is fairly straightforward if done correctly. If done poorly, expect your home to sit on the market for six months to a year before selling. That’s if it sells at all.

What’s Important

You cannot possibly imagine all the gimmicky schemes Realtors use to sell houses. The secret is that most of those gimmicky schemes are used to acquire you as a client. They have very little to do with actually selling your home. A good example is a drone flyover. A drone flyover is a really cool way to feature your home. However, the problem with marketing items like that is they are designed more to make you (the home seller) say “wow, that’s amazing!” In reality videos are incredibly hard to publicize on any meaningful scale. Keep in mind that your home is designed to be marketed temporarily. That is to say your home should be sold relatively quickly and only once. If marketed properly, your home should sell before there is enough time to have a drone video produced. Other schemes include Broker Open Houses, postcards to the neighborhood and such. These are all designed to look valuable to procure you as a client. It’s the shiny object.

With that being said, the most important factor in selling your home is the price. There is a trend towards interviewing more than one Realtor in order to find the best agent to sell your home. This is a good idea. However, this is where it can get dangerous for the home seller. Inevitably each Realtor will give you some sort of presentation. During that presentation you will get a different price from each Realtor. Pricing homes is more of an art than a science. Be very critical if one of the Realtors has a substantially higher price than the other(s). This could be a scheme that is called padded pricing. This is where a Realtor will inflate the price of a home in order to obtain the listing. They know that the home will not sell at that price. The goal will be to wait a short while and then suggest a price reduction. That price reduction will put your home in line with what the other Realtor(s) suggested as a price. This is not always the case, but be on guard for this type of nonsense.

Price is the most important item related to selling your home. The second most important item is professional photographs. Your home should be photographed by an actual professional. This should not involve an iPhone or any kind of phone. Your photographs should be taken with a camera that costs about that of a cheap used car. Anything less is just amateurish. Ask potential Realtors for examples of past listings so you can get an idea of what sort of photographs you can expect.

The last item that is important is positioning. This is creating the marketing so it makes sense to the consumer and is easy to find. This includes simple things like not pricing your home at $473,268.00. That’s a confusing number to a consumer. A better price would be an even $475,000. That makes more sense and is a number that a potential buyer can wrap their head around. Pricing your home at even intervals (what we call cusp pricing) also helps potential buyers find your home online. It’s unlikely buyers will go to a real estate website and say the maximum they can afford is $474,300.

That’s it. Pricing, photographs and positioning are all it takes to sell your home. The rest is smoke and mirrors designed to solicit your business.